Aug 26 2008
The End of the Bedtime Story? Narratives in New Forms
Stories are fundamental to human experience – we can think of the earliest recorded examples of storytelling with pictures in caves, and of oral histories and legends passed down through generations. Much later we saw the rise of the novel and more generally the history of both fiction and non-fiction. Closer to our time, cinematic developments have seen storytelling reshaped again. How much have these cultural forms consisted of narrative?
Fast forward to the 1990s and later, and the advent of new media has seen significant changes in how we make use of information. Digital technology’s golden child, the internet, has provided the ideal platform for the database, which organises information in a vastly different way to narrative. What, if any, are their links? Are database and narrative purely oppositional?
Our experience of ’story’ might change in this new atmosphere, one where actual lives are immersed in virtual worlds, and users/producers remix and create their own media. Is narrative being reshaped? How might this affect our experience and understanding of the world?
READINGS:
Hardy, Barbara (1977) ‘The Nature of Narrative’ in The Collected Essays of Barbara Hardy, pp. 1-13. [This is in hardcopy in the library, or PDF attached. (3.5Mb)]
Manovich, Lev (2001) The Language of New Media. ‘Cultural Interfaces (pp. 69-93); ‘Illusion, Narrative, and Interactivity’ (pp. 205-211); ‘Database and Narrative’ (pp. 225-228); ‘Navigable Space’ (pp. 244-252); ‘Digital Cinema and the History of the Moving Image’ (pp. 293-296); ‘The New Temporality: Loop as a Narrative Engine’ (pp. 314-322). [In Reserve section of library, unfortunately. You can access a few pages on Google Books.]
www.craigbellamy.net [a blog about web 2.0 developments], especially http://www.craigbellamy.net/2006/10/26/new-media-and-cultural-
form-narrative-versus-database/
Cameron, Andy. ‘Dissimulations: illusions of interactivity’ in Millenium Film Journal 28 (Spring 1995). http://mfj-online.org/journalPages/MFJ28/Dissimulation.html
Brown, Neil et al (2003). ‘Interactive narrative as a multi-temporal agency’, in Future Cinema: the cinematic imagery after film. http://icinema.unsw.edu.au/pdf/interactive_narrative.pdf For background information, go to http://www.icinema.unsw.edu.au/projects/prj_tvis_II_1.html
If you want to, you can try Facade, an interactive narrative! [download via BitTorrent.] http://tomidblog.blogspot.com/2007/02/presentation-of-digital-narrative.html For a user’s feedback, go to http://interactivestory.net/
SOME QUESTIONS TO THINK ABOUT:
1. To what extent does narrative filter/shape your experience of life?
2. How does the database foster interactivity?
3. In the absence of linear plots and other narrative qualities, what makes an ‘interactive’ narrative a ‘narrative’?
4. If database is becoming ubiquitous, does this mean a break from the past? Or simply remixing of traditional forms?
5. What is the role of temporality in traditional narrative, and how might interactivity be affecting that?
10 responses so far
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10 Responses to “The End of the Bedtime Story? Narratives in New Forms”
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I’ve yet to be able to convince myself that there aren’t any narratives in our lives. We all grew up with narratives playing a dominant part in our lives – from bedtime stories as a child, dreaming to making up stories about ourselves (as an escape from the stubbornness of identity, as quoted from Babara’s article).
With the rise of technology, there has been question as to whether narratives is still in its original form or has taken on a new form altogether. I believe that it’s not the end of the bedtime story yet. It’s just that technology has created a database which eases the flow of information in a narrative. No longer does narrative follow a hierarchy structure but it’s now free floating and people are able to access such information randomly.
I was thinking of narratives in video games, as mentioned on one of the articles. During gameplay, the player is the author who need to perform actions to move the narrative forward. The text would be dialogues/descriptions throughout the game. The story would reveal itself as the player progresses in the game. The fabula! My personal favourite! One would learn not to throw a grenade too near oneself, if not, death would occur! Content would depend on how the player plays the game.
Hmm… not sure what else to say about narratives.
Spill your thoughts!
I guess narratives are not going to disappear, at least in the near future. Up to this point, I think narratives and databases are both supporting each other. Databases are made up of narratives, for example, as we mentioned in the seminar, Wikipedia is a database composed by millions and millions of narratives of different kinds. And narratives like movies and books, are being sorted into genres that can be stored in a database.
As Jo mentioned, during gameplay, player becomes the author to move the narrative forward. I guess we shouldn’t say ‘player becomes the author’? Although players can decide what they want to do during the game, but what happens next, or how the narrative goes, is still being set by the author of the game, not players. However I guess narratives do structure our minds and experiences that we won’t do certain things (Jo’s example) during gameplay to achieve success, which is so true.
Well guess I have to do the second comment now, or else I won’t have time to do in the weekend.
I cannot deny that the internet as a giant database did make our lives a lot easier, e.g. searching for books in the library, or useful stuff through google or in wikipedia. If our lives are formed by different sorts of narratives like stories and life experiences, databases have enhanced them and so enriched our lives. And I guess the fun thing is we all can contribute to this huge database! It broadens our horizon so greatly.
In my opinion, narratives and databases are just as important as each other to my life, because my life is exciting as being formed by narratives and databases helped me really much by things I have just mentioned. My life won’t be complete if anyone of them is missing…
What do you think?
I think I tend to agree with Shemila really, maybe extending her point to say that it’s almost a false dichotomy to look at the world’s information as being organised either through narrative or a database. I mean, for me it seems to be an endlessly diminishing reduction of what large pieces of information are made up of.
I mean, you tell a story. This story is made up of individual components. You can’t tell a story about Little Red Riding Hood without knowing what a wolf is, and what a cottage is and so on. This wolf is a single, prototypical or archetypical construct in our mind. We hear the word “wolf” and get a shaggy fierce canine in our minds. But, these adjectives, shaggy, fierce etc are informed by experiences, and by their relation to actual things, or otherwise put, a story or maybe even dialogue running between the trait and the thing possessing this trait.
Our concept of shaggy can’t exist without an instance of it, but it also can’t exist without other, non shaggy things to make shagginess stand out and unique.
This may not be the most clear example, but hopefully I’ve made my point that I kind of think that database and narrative are in a constant dialogue with one another, and always have been.
As everybody has mentioned above, I find it difficult to believe that we no longer have narratives in our lives, or that narrative and databases can exist separately from each other…
The idea of choosing one or the other was explored in the Barbara Hardy text. She mentioned an interesting point in ‘The Nature of Narrative’, about how it is expected as children we start out exploring life through narratives (playing make believe etc), but as we get older we are expected to move towards more realistic or truthful mindset, and reject the narrative. Why should we have to choose, or move from one to the other? And why does society deem a narrative to be lesser than realistic text?
I guess as children, narratives are deemed as make believe/fantasy stories. But as we grow older, the idea of fantasy is regarded as something irrational, unrealistic – something that adults should snap out from. Adults may reject narratives in these story forms… but have they ever realised that narratives are still working in the background? Our lives, our lifestories, our experience, how we perceive the world etc, are part of a narrative which links together… that is how we make sense of the world, people and things around us!
I think that most adults do reject the notation of the narrative, and are simply unaware that they still employ narrative in the background, like Joanne said. I myself was aware that I daydreamed in narrative form, but didn’t realise that I use narrative to remember and recall my past!
This division (between narrative and realism) is reflected, I think, in the narrative versus database debate. At the beginning of the seminar I felt that I had choose either narrative or databases, and that they couldn’t really co-exist, but as we continued to discuss the two, I began to see that we are living in a combination of the two, and that they can’t really be completely separate from each other.
I had much the same progression as I thought about narrative vs. database. Beginning by setting them up as opposites, I began to realise that each informs the other. Not just that narrative is such because it is not database, and database is such because it is not narrative (since we define things by what they are not) – but that our experience of narratives in our lives don’t exclude the organising of information into database, and vice versa. Like Chris said, it’s a false dichotomy (exactly the term I used as I thought about it).
However, if there is a balance to be found between how much of each method of understanding and forming life experience, then I think database is weighing heavier than ever before. But (as we all seem to agree) narrative doesn’t disappear in a digital media landscape. I think we will always make sense of life in stories, no matter how much our entertainment and work experiences are ordered as database.
Another thought:
A particular aspect of this narrative-database debate is the idea of the author. Traditional storytelling requires a narrator, outside of the story, creating it. But in digital technology practices, such as gaming, the subject and author collapse into each other. You are a part of the story, creating it all the while. To take the previous example of Little Red Riding Hood – Little Red is acting on the story, creating it while being a part of it. I guess this is where interactivity enters. Interactive narrative (whatever that it, since most of these terms are still floating around our heads without clarity) pulls together the actor and narrator. And this is enabled in a way never possible before digital technology and the internet.
There’s a whole lot more to be said for interactivity – how much control is distributed between the framework of the story and the actor/author within in; and how temporality is all shook up – but I don’t think I have the time or space here…
I think that’s a pretty interesting point Kiri, and definitely a relevant one, especially when we see so many authors play with this idea. I’m thinking particularly here with regards to your comment about the actor and narrator, and thinking of stories that break the 4th wall.
In terms of storytelling, this isn’t such a new idea. I have memories of watching Looney Tunes cartoons from the 50s in which Daffy Duck would have a fight with a cartoonist’s pencil, and the cartoonist would fight back by drawing guns to shoot at Daffy, or erasing bits of Daffy’s body.
I guess the significance of this lies in whether the watcher is engaged in the story that runs between the author and the audience, the actor and the audience or the author/actor and audience.
In terms of the place of the author in this kind of world, I would say they are still necessary in order to prompt the audience to engage their own stories with the author’s own. So even in user directed narratives, the author provides a framework on which to move.
I think as technology and our understanding of it progress these interactions will become less clumsy, and potentially more satisfying that they are now, what with Choose your own Adventure books and “interactive” tv being kind of the pinnacle of the “interactive narrative” as it is seen today. It’s very blunt, and there are more ways to dictate a story’s progression than literally choosing.